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June 30 - October 20, 2018
Curing the negatives does not produce the positives. In jargon, the correlation between sadness and happiness is not anything close to −1.00; it is more like −0.40.
The skills of becoming happy turn out to be almost entirely different from the skills of not being sad, not being anxious, or not being angry.
But at its best, psychology had only told us how to relieve misery, not how to find what is best in life and live it accordingly. This was the unbaked half that would become Positive Psychology.
In 2002, I published the third book of the series: Authentic Happiness. This book sets forward a larger theory about the positive side of life: “happiness” is a scientifically unwieldy notion, but there are three different forms of it you can pursue. For the “Pleasant Life,” you aim to have as much positive emotion as possible and learn the skills to amplify positive emotion. For the “Engaged Life,” you identify your highest strengths and talents and recraft your life to use them as much as you can in work, love, friendship, parenting, and leisure. For the “Meaningful Life,” you use your
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I am not against self-esteem, but I believe that self-esteem is just a meter that reads out the state of the system. It is not an end in itself. When you are doing well in school or work, when you are doing well with the people you love, when you are doing well in play, the meter will register high. When you are doing badly, it will register low.
depression is not just about mental suffering; it is also about lowered productivity and worsened physical health.
The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe defeat is just a temporary setback, that its causes are confined to this one case. The optimists believe defeat is not their fault: Circumstances, bad luck, or other people brought it about.
Literally hundreds of studies show that pessimists give up more easily and get depressed more often. These experiments also show that optimists do much better in school and college, at work and on the playing field.
Pessimists can in fact learn to be optimists, and not through mindless devices like whistling a happy tune or mouthing platitudes (“Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better”), but by learning a new set of cognitive skills.
The long period between infancy and our last years is a process of emerging from helplessness and gaining personal control. Personal control means the ability to change things by one’s voluntary actions; it is the opposite of helplessness.
But twenty-five years of study has convinced me that if we habitually believe, as does the pessimist, that misfortune is our fault, is enduring, and will undermine everything we do, more of it will befall us than if we believe otherwise. I am also convinced that if we are in the grip of this view, we will get depressed easily, we will accomplish less than our potential, and we will even get physically sick more often. Pessimistic prophecies are self-fulfilling.
But careful research shows that people with pessimistic habits of thinking can transform mere setbacks into disasters. One way they do this is by converting their own innocence into guilt.
For the age of the self is also the age of that phenomenon so closely linked to pessimism: depression, the ultimate expression of pessimism.
Antidepressant drugs are not addicting in the usual sense; the patient does not crave them when they are withdrawn. Rather, when the successfully treated patient stops taking his drugs, the depression often returns. The effectively drugged patient cannot credit himself for carving out his happiness and his ability to function with a semblance of normality; he must credit the pills.
WHAT IF the great majority of depressions are much simpler than the biological psychiatrists and the psychoanalysts believe?
What comes next are a powerful set of what-if questions that scrutinise our thinking about depression ...
DEPRESSION, achievement, and physical health are three of the most obvious applications of learned optimism. But there is also the potential for a new understanding of yourself.
We have found over the years that positive statements you make to yourself have little if any effect. What is crucial is what you think when you fail, using the power of “non-negative thinking.”
Changing the destructive things you say to yourself when you experience the setbacks that life deals all of us is the central skill of optimism.
Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn’t matter.
Optimism has an important place in some, though not all, realms of your life. It is not a panacea. But it can protect you against depression; it can raise your level of achievement; it can enhance your physical well-being; it is a far more pleasant mental state to be in.
To the scientists of the Renaissance, your critic was really your ally, helping you advance upon reality.
HOW DO you think about the causes of the misfortunes, small and large, that befall you? Some people, the ones who give up easily, habitually say of their misfortunes: “It’s me, it’s going to last forever, it’s going to undermine everything I do.” Others, those who resist giving in to misfortune, say: “It was just circumstances, it’s going away quickly anyway, and, besides, there’s much more in life.”
Your habitual way of explaining bad events, your explanatory style, is more than just the words you mouth when you fail. It is a habit of thought, learned in childhood and adolescence. Your explanatory style stems directly from your view of your place in the world—whether you think you are valuable and deserving, or worthless and hopeless. It is the hallmark of whether you are an optimist or a pessimist.
THERE ARE three crucial dimensions to your explanatory style: permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization.
If you think about bad things in always’s and never’s and abiding traits, you have a permanent, pessimistic style. If you think in sometimes’s and lately’s, if you use qualifiers and blame bad events on transient conditions, you have an optimistic style.
People who believe good events have permanent causes try even harder after they succeed. People who see temporary reasons for good events may give up even when they succeed, believing success was a fluke.
PERMANENCE is about time. Pervasiveness is about space.
Some people can put their troubles neatly into a box and go about their lives even when one important aspect of it—their job, for example, or their love life—is suffering. Others bleed all over everything. They catastrophize. When one thread of their lives snaps, the whole fabric unravels.
Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions of our explanatory style: pervasiveness and permanence.
Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope: Temporary causes limit helplessness in time, and specific causes limit helplessness to the original situation. On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors. Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair.
People who make permanent and universal explanations for their troubles tend to collapse under pressure, both for a long time and across situations. No other single score is as important as your hope score.
People who blame themselves when they fail have low self-esteem as a consequence. They think they are worthless, talentless, and unlovable. People who blame external events do not lose self-esteem when bad events strike. On the whole, they like themselves better than people who blame themselves do.
depressed people often take much more responsibility for bad events than is warranted.
IT MATTERS a great deal if your explanatory style is pessimistic. If you scored poorly, there are four areas where you will encounter (and probably already have encountered) trouble. First, as we will see in the next chapter, you are likely to get depressed easily. Second, you are probably achieving less at work than your talents warrant. Third, your physical health—and your immune function—are probably not what they should be, and this may get even worse as you get older. Finally, life is not as pleasurable as it should be. Pessimistic explanatory style is a misery.
Depression is pessimism writ large, and to understand pessimism, a subtle phenomenon, it helps to look at the expanded, exaggerated form.
Almost all of us have gone through depression and know how it poisons daily life. For some it is a rare experience, descending on us only when several of our best hopes all collapse at once. For many of us, it is more familiar, a state that afflicts us every time we are defeated. For still others, it is a constant companion, draining the joy from even our best times and darkening the grayer times to an unrelieved black.
Depression comes in three kinds. The first is called normal depression, and it is the type each of us knows well.
Normal depression is extremely common—it’s the common cold of mental illness.
The two other kinds of depression are called depressive disorders: unipolar and bipolar depression.
Mania is a psychological condition with a set of symptoms that look like the opposite of depression: unwarranted euphoria, grandiosity, frenetic talk and action, and inflated self-esteem.
The clincher, I feel, is that normal depression and unipolar depression are recognized in exactly the same way. Both involve the same four types of negative change: in thought, mood, behavior, and physical responses.
What comes next is an interesting and vivid description of these four elements.
A pessimistic explanatory style is at the core of depressed thinking. A negative concept of the future, the self, and the world stems from seeing the causes of bad events as permanent, pervasive, and personal, and seeing the causes of good events in the opposite way.
Americans, on average, may be more depressed, and at a younger age, than they have ever been: unprecedented psychological misery in a nation with unprecedented prosperity and material well-being.
We knew the cause of learned helplessness, and now we could see it as the cause of depression: the belief that your actions will be futile. This belief was engendered by defeat and failure as well as by uncontrollable situations. Depression could be caused by defeat, failure, and loss and the consequent belief that any actions taken will be futile.
Ellis successfully challenged the hallowed belief that mental illness is an enormously intricate, even mysterious phenomenon, curable only when deep unconscious conflicts are brought to light or a medical illness is rooted out. In the complexified world of psychology, this stripped-down approach came off as revolutionary.
Depression is nothing more than its symptoms. It is caused by conscious negative thoughts. There is no deep underlying disorder to be rooted out: not unresolved childhood conflicts, not our unconscious anger, and not even our brain chemistry.
Our reasoning was straightforward. Depression results from lifelong habits of conscious thought. If we change these habits of thought, we will cure depression. Let’s make a direct assault on conscious thought, we said, using everything we know to change the way our patients think about bad events. Out of this came the new approach, which Beck called cognitive therapy.
HOW YOU THINK about your problems, including depression itself, will either relieve depression or aggravate it. A failure or a defeat can teach you that you are now helpless, but learned helplessness will produce only momentary symptoms of depression—unless you have a pessimistic explanatory style. If you do, then failure and defeat can throw you into a full-blown depression. On the other hand, if your explanatory style is optimistic, your depression will be halted.
Men tend to act rather than reflect, but women tend to contemplate their depression, mulling it over and over, trying to analyze it and determine its source. Psychologists call this process of obsessive analysis rumination
Rumination combined with pessimistic explanatory style is the recipe for severe depression.
